In a known apparatus for distributing or transferring bottles, pneumatically operated tubular grippers are used which are lowered towards the bottles to grasp the neck thereof and to transfer them in series or in groups to the successive processing step. After grasping the conical neck of the bottles which are supplied in a conveying direction as well as transversely thereto, the grippers lift the bottles to swing them in a suspended position about a horizontal axis toward the next location. After releasing the pressure provided by the compressed air to allow further advance of the bottles, the grippers return to their original positions to pick up the next group of bottles.
Such an intermittently operating apparatus has the disadvantage that the bottles may lose their stability and tip over when being grasped by the grippers or placed onto the respective location. This is especially true when the bottles are to cooperate with a moving conveyor or the bottle bottom is damaged. Consequently, an operator must continuously be placed on guard to restore dropped bottles to the upright position so as to secure a trouble-free transportation thereof. Apart from the fact that such grippers are expensive in design due to the swivelling about the horizontal axis, the use thereof damages any foil wrap of the caps of bottles stripped from the grippers so that the appearance of the bottles is marred.
German Pat. No. 31 41 364 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,467,908 disclose a distributing device using a main star-wheel conveyor which receives continuously supplied bottles and cooperates with two further star-wheel conveyors arranged at its circumference in such a manner that the bottles are alternatingly passed from the main star-wheel conveyor to the further star-wheel conveyors. Associated with each of the further star-wheel conveyors is a double row take-out conveyor so that the bottles are respectively transferred in two rows.
Although achieving a controlled reduction of the transport speed and transfer of the bottles into two separate rows, the distributing device is very complicated especially when it comes to a trouble-free transfer between the star-wheel conveyors. Since the star-wheels are provided with varying pitch and do not fittingly engage with each other, the bottles must be laterally shifted so that unstable areas especially at the transfer point to the first star-wheel are obtained. This leads to an inexact guidance of the bottles which thus may wobble and tip over thus resulting in an interruption of the transport. Taking into account that the further star-wheels run at a different speed than the double-lane conveyor belts, the bottles which already tend to wobble at the essentially guideless exchange points between the star-wheels will further loose their stability by the transfer onto the slower conveyor belts so that a great number of bottles will eventually tip over.